Red-Green Revolution by Victor Wallis

Author:Victor Wallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Political Animal Press
Published: 2018-11-04T00:41:34+00:00

Addressing Militarism and Imperialism

Given capital’s sacrosanct commitment to growth, it is understandable that mainstream environmentalist organizations are loath to deconstruct the phenomenon of consumption. To distinguish between useful and wasteful (or harmful) consumption would be to defy the precept that all such determinations should be made through the workings of the market—except where government acts directly on behalf of capital.

The military sector of production and “service” is of particular relevance here, because it does not arise in response to any kind of direct mass demand. Within the advanced capitalist countries, the military performs an instrumental function which is truly vital only to the ruling class. This is especially the case with the US military, which, since 1945, has been the unrivalled global enforcer of capitalist interests.34 US military operations—including training and weapons-development as well as actual fighting—occupy a distinctive position in economic/ecological terms, in that their very mission of protecting capital releases them from any possible restraint that might impinge on enterprises competing with one another (let alone any restraint arising from organized popular pressure). This applies as much to private military contractors as it does to the official armed forces. What is decisive is that both are underwritten by the “employer of last resort,” which in this issue-area transmits the consensus of corporate capital reflected in the governing political duopoly.

The free rein enjoyed by the military/paramilitary consists not only in the unchallenged funding of its massive worldwide operations but also, more specifically, in the protection it enjoys, grounded in “security” arguments, against political questioning of its toxic practices, such as the pervasive use of dioxin in Vietnam and of depleted-uranium shell-casings in Iraq35—not to mention the continuous prodigious consumption of petroleum which prompted the observation (by Michael Klare) that a major consideration behind US occupation of oil-rich lands is to assure a sufficient fuel-supply to sustain the military activities themselves.36

The larger imperial drive underlying the acceptance of such a self-perpetuating cycle remains for the most part outside the sphere of public debate. Mainstream politicians conveying disquiet about the Iraq occupation thus spoke of “redeploying” US troops rather than questioning their interventionist role as such. This reflects the extraordinary degree to which imperialist assumptions pervade the full bipartisan spectrum of US politics, constituting the central obstacle to any critical rethinking of the goals of production and consumption.

The separation of the growth issue from the question of militarism and imperialism reflects the ideological parameters of US political discourse. Growth is an issue of “the economy,” which is defined as a “domestic” matter; militarism, global projection, and war come under the heading of “foreign policy.” This compartmentalization is entirely spurious; its deeply ingrained status is a major block to working-class/popular awareness. The ecological crisis—as illustrated in the threat posed to all coastlines by the melting of polar icecaps—is at once a global and a “domestic” issue. Its adequate explication could help shatter, once and for all, popular acquiescence in one of the key blinders erected by bourgeois ideology.

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